Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang
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Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang
#2I don't think LLMs are conscious. But of course to say that definitively you have to define consciousness, and then you quickly dig yourself into a deep hole, which is why I can't say anything but "meh" to someone who is so keen to go on the record to say "absolutely not".
Coincidentally I just read "Children of Memory", which was published in 2022 and I wonder if the advent of LLMs had any influence on Adrian Tchaikovsky's conception of the Ravens? The Ravens are excellent analysts but they themselves insist that they are not conscious, and then go on to say that we (humans) aren't really either...
Of course humans are conscious, because just about the only thing we can all agree on about consciousness is that it's a thing we have. Nowadays many of us also agree that a lot or all other mammals, and perhaps birds, also have that thing. But they don't have sophisticated abstract language, which LLMs do. So consciousness is something having to do with embodiment and feelings, not language and higher reasoning. Maybe I'm a chimpanzee with an LLM add-on, then?
It seems that by creating LLMs we've already solved the harder problem of making "AGI". Now we just have to give them an embodiment add-on so that they can have an independent will and then Ted Chiang will have to shut up? But therein lies the peril, doesn't it?
Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang
#3Ted Chiang is brilliant.
His novella “Anxiety is the Dizziness of Freedom” altered the course of my life. It changed the way I looked back at certain pivotal moments in my life and taught me to think about those pivotal moments differently than how I was thinking about them. Similar to what happens to one of the characters in the story who ends up changing their perception of a key moment in their life.
I won’t go into detail because I don’t want to spoil the story but I highly recommend it. Actually I recommend all his stories to be honest.
Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang
#4Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang
#5Consciousness is a label like fat, smart, man, grumpy, cool. Like money, property, or the idea of a week, it's something that we've loosely agreed to out of convenience, not because it's some intrinsic property of the mind. It's a useful label because it determines how we treat things - that's fine.
But insisting on searching for it is like searching for cognitive aether. It's the social equivalent of phlogiston. Like all of these ideas, they exist in our heads as a map - a way of navigating the world, but when we hunt for it's existence in the real world and fail, time after time, we have to remind ourselves that the map is emphatically not the territory. We will never find consciousness because it's like looking for a scientific characteristic of property ownership. It's a category error.
Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang
#6> We don’t need to fully understand the nature of consciousness to definitively say that certain things are not conscious, and conversational transcripts fall in that category.
Well said.
I think it is obvious and it has been obvious from the start that next token predictors are not conscious.
Of course the extremely predictable clapback from AI-psychosis enjoyers is typically "you're just a next token predictor too!" but that is so obviously incorrect and misanthropic that it can be dismissed out of hand and doesn't really merit much further consideration.
Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang
#7Has Chaing solved the hard problem of consciousness? I suspect not.
Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang
#8> We don’t need to fully understand the nature of consciousness to definitively say that certain things are not conscious, and conversational transcripts fall in that category. Well said. I think it is obvious and it has been obvious from the start that next token predictors are not conscious. Of course the extremely predictable clapback from AI-psychosis enjoyers is typically "you're just a next token predictor too!…
> misanthropic
Whether it’s misanthropic or not has no bearing on whether that’s true. That’s basically saying you don’t like a truth therefore anyone who claims that that truth is true is a bad person.
> so obviously incorrect
It should be easy enough to explain why that’s incorrect then
Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang
#9Consciousness is a label like fat, smart, man, grumpy, cool. Like money, property, or the idea of a week, it's something that we've loosely agreed to out of convenience, not because it's some intrinsic property of the mind. It's a useful label because it determines how we treat things - that's fine. But insisting on searching for it is like searching for cognitive aether. It's the social equivalent of phlogiston. Lik…
Do you believe in the existence of any noun words which serve as something other than a "useful label, loosely agreed to out of convenience"?
Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang
#10> We don’t need to fully understand the nature of consciousness to definitively say that certain things are not conscious, and conversational transcripts fall in that category. Well said. I think it is obvious and it has been obvious from the start that next token predictors are not conscious. Of course the extremely predictable clapback from AI-psychosis enjoyers is typically "you're just a next token predictor too!…
> misanthropic Whether it’s misanthropic or not has no bearing on whether that’s true. That’s basically saying you don’t like a truth therefore anyone who claims that that truth is true is a bad person. > so obviously incorrect It should be easy enough to explain why that’s incorrect then
Misanthropic has bearing, the company's name is Anthropic.